Chapter 6 - Turning Plays into Libels: Satire and Sedition in Jonson’s Poetaster

Summary

Ben Jonson never tired of railing against those who would apply his supposedly innocent satire to particular persons and “make a libel which he made a play.” Yet the central irony of Poetaster (1601) – and, indeed, of Jonson’s playwriting career – is that he undeniably did lampoon specific individuals, not to mention the host of more ambiguous topical analogies that appear in his plays. In Poetaster – set in an Augustan Rome that clearly stands for England – Jonson sharply satirizes the late Elizabethan surveillance state through the clash between Horace, the virtuous satirist and authorial stand-in, and Lupus, the corrupt and ignorant tribune. From the Bishops’ Ban in 1599 to the aftermath of the Essex Rising in 1601, the regime cracked down on verse satires and seditious libels with unusual severity; the line between satire and libel threatened to vanish altogether. Yet Jonson remained undaunted. In Poetaster, he counts on his audiences to draw precisely those topical applications that he stridently denies. If they make his play a libel, it is because he has turned playgoers into libel-makers.